Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

Now that I’ve trashed its chairman, I feel like I should say something charitable about Microsoft. Fortunately, Microsoft blogger Andrej Budja has given me just the thing: the Mac version of XBox favorite Halo (which, some may recall, actually started its life as a Mac game before developer Bungie was acquired by Microsoft) is finally in beta!

If there is one thing I will give Microsoft loads of credit for, it’s the XBox. It’s a great product, Halo (its flagship title) is an incredible game, and Microsoft’s online gaming service (XBox Live) is, in my opinion, proof that Microsoft is capable of being a leader and not merely a wicked fast follower.

Major props to Microsoft and Mac game porter Westlake Interactive for getting the Mac version of Halo in shape so soon after the PC one. I very much look forward to giving my PowerBook’s 64 MB video card a good workout!

I don’t usually like to descend to the level of taking potshots (or participating in Mac versus PC debates), but I just can’t resist mentioning Bill Gates’s official “home page” (thanks to my brother Bobby for turning me on to this, by the way). The site, which collects a number of Chairman Bill’s most vital essays and speeches, is a revealing glimpse into what passes for deep thought in Redmond these days.

The tone is immediately set by a photo of our hero, hand clenched at his breast, staring off into the distance, the mildly smug expression of a man who “gets it” on his face. And what does he get? Well, just take a look at the witty anecdote emblazoned in big bold letters beneath his portrait:

“My daughter and I were walking down the street and I said, ‘Let’s go to the record store,’ and she said, ‘What’s a record?’”

How insightful! Truly, he is a man with his finger on the pulse of technology and youth culture!

What’s that—you’re not convinced? Then scroll down the page a little further and marvel at the profundity of his Wall Street Journal op-ed/marketing piece, provocatively titled “Why I Hate Spam!” Only a truly bold leader would be willing to take such a controversial stand on something so near and dear to the hearts of email users everywhere. Obviously, Bill has an almost preternatural ability to home in on and analyze the important issues of the day (Spam == Bad)!

All of this sarcasm may sound a bit snotty, considering I’m picking on targets as easy as Bill Gates and the notoriously wooden Microsoft marketing machine, but it gets at an annoyance I’ve had for a long time: the tendency of average people to think of Bill Gates as some sort of all-knowing technological oracle whose every utterance is a glimpse into the future (witness, for example, the late night TV ads that offer a quote from Bill Gates as evidence of the growing market for public access Internet terminals). Let’s get this straight people: Bill’s record as a businessman is stellar, but when it comes to bleeding edge technology, most of the better webloggers out there are a lot more savvy!

(Update: Here, for the benefit of posterity, is a PDF of the Gates home page as it stands today.)

The Apple employee blogosphere is talking this evening about a recent college graduate who emailed a number of us (including myself, Erik Barzeski, Eric Albert, Chuq Von Rospach, and Alexei Kosut) a rather thorough questionnaire asking what it’s like to work at Apple, how we got our jobs, what the interview process was like, etc.

Essentially, the discussion hinges on Eric’s surprise at discovering, through Alexei and Chuqui, that this enterprising young man had sent the exact same email to a number of us. Eric’s problem isn’t so much with providing a little advice (which he did), but rather with the fact that the guy didn’t make it more clear that his was a mass mailing.

My take, for the record, is this: I agree that what our job seeker did was cheezy, but then, so is almost everything else about trying to find a job. Any college career office or “how to get hired” manual will tell you to use similar tactics (deceptive tricks to learn the name of the hiring manager, for example), and I personally think this young man was simply trying to work smarter not harder by harnessing the innate networking power of “social software” (incidentally, I was aware of the guy well before he emailed me—I had seen him asking similar questions of the “Apple Alumni” tribe on Tribe.net!).

(Update: I must have mistaken someone else for the person I’m talking about here, since the job seeker claims never to have visited Tribe.net. Apologies…)

It’s easy, when you’re ensconced in a relatively secure job at a company you love, to forget how frustrating and demoralizing it can be to be a freshly minted college graduate looking for an “in” in this economy. I’ve been on both sides of the table, and I know acutely how difficult it can be knowing that you have the passion and ability to do a job well but not knowing how to get people to even give you the time of day (there was an excellent “My Turn” piece in Newsweek a few weeks ago that explains this problem poignantly). Knowing this, I have a strong tendency to cut people like our boy a fair amount of slack.